Pruning Our Failed Paradigms
We must clean our intellectual house
Photo by
Kostiantyn Li on
UnsplashWe live in an age of failing systems. Everywhere around us, we see paradigmatic failure. People still refuse to acknowledge the extent of these failures, although the social and political consequences are constantly described, analyzed, and worsening by the day.
Because we are linear thinkers, we see these only as individual system problems and fail to see the integrated totality. We insist on individually labeling the winners and losers but refuse to see the aggregate problem.
That integration is what creates the inarticulate malaise that haunts us daily. You cannot solve that problem without focusing on the causes. And there is the problem of using the same techniques to solve a problem that was used to create it.
As the list of failures grows, we concentrate on the superficial symptoms. This works to limit our anxiety, as negative details can hide the more extensive system failures. We refuse to see structural collapse, preferring to see only superficial shortcomings.
This is, itself, a sign of the more significant failure.
Using America as the paradigmatic center of our failing world, people wonder about the absence of political leaders. The command and control systems at the center of our nation-state are increasingly filled with idiots, incompetents, and criminals scrambling for the spoils of paradigmatic collapse.
Aging leaders of the working system are all that is left, with a few younger people struggling against blindness and stupidity. It is easy to say that incompetents and criminals have always been a problem, but not at this level.
The problem is not the refusal of the young to take responsibility but their realization that the cumulative effects of systemic collapse are overwhelming. It makes no sense to throw oneself on the funeral pyre of the American Empire.
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I'm afraid we are already at the point where those managing the change have already recognized a lost cause.
How many thoughtful people do you know who have given up? Hope that justifies commitment to the future and our common good has been replaced by avarice and individual greed. Those are the only thing that explains public action, but that is the action of plunder and destruction.
The knowledge from our scientific paradigm with the production of technology across all areas is the sole success, but that is crippled by the failure to extend it beyond materialist distortions. We have specialized in producing technicians who are disasters as generalists.
This failure was evident in the early 20th-century German scientific breakthroughs implemented for fascist monsters. It was also recognized in a similar loss underlying the consequences of the Vietnam War, as outlined by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest.
This is another paradigmatic failure directly resulting from tolerating religious ignorance as a political compromise. The Western split between physics and metaphysics accepted social manipulation by superstition while failing to assign that responsibility to the masters of physical reality.
This has allowed failed systems to survive and thrive in the hands of the greedy and selfish and has crippled human societies. Racism, hierarchical rule, irrational religions, and bigotry extending to social suppression and slavery have long been recognized as poisonous to thriving communities.
These failed systems must be actively replaced with rational systems dedicated to common well-being. This is the requirement of a successful human social and economic system.
We must work to prune and maintain our social systems for them to grow and thrive. An agricultural model suggests the removal of parasites and pruning to encourage new growth, but we have done none of that.
We have allowed the ignorant and the greedy to substitute their success at theft and oppression as the only principles of social maintenance. While our science and technology offer the options of universal well-being and education, we allow these to be exploited and undercut by medieval ideas.
The wealthiest 'technicians' are fools who end up replicating feudal systems. Their technical systems are entirely rational, but their human systems are archaic. The reappearance of fascist forms is symptomatic. Fascism is feudalism in a military-industrial state.
Our failed paradigms include selectively, ethnocentrism, misogyny, tribalism, monarchy, empires, republics, and nation-states, all based exclusively on materialism and forms of economic slavery. The military-industrial nation-state is the deadliest hybrid, but we refuse to give it up.
The cumulative consequences of the errors of these systems are destroying our health and biosphere. Yet we glorify our economic systems' brutality and structural failures as our most significant accomplishments. No one at a meaningful level dares to challenge the preeminence of our failing systems.
We endlessly recycle failed paradigms and the failing leaders that those systems give us and wonder why we are collapsing. We are constantly reminded that, though our systems bring only confusion and anger, this must be some mysterious and temporary aberration.
But most of us know better. Sadly, the criteria for authority in our system prevent any necessary change, with the result that only idiots struggle for positions of authority. Distorted materialist values ensure that the goals of those seeking political power are greed and hatred.
The above list is incomplete. Many of those systems evolved from the earlier systems on this list, and the process is complex as both population numbers and centuries of error drive everything.
Our nation-state planetary model is in violent failure in many regions. The Middle East has the world's attention as Israel represents the technical peak of that system and its most horrendous failure. The mindless violence and genocide on all sides of the current long-term disaster are only the most visible. Equal numbers of innocent people are being killed in Africa.
Our failed paradigms are not a dyadic list. There were limited successes and less than total failures. These are not black and white but shades of grey now tending strongly toward black because errors and oversights are cumulative at the paradigmatic level.
That adds to our confusion and requires sophisticated thought. Our evolutionary forms of fast thinking are now wrong and set us up for paradigmatic failure.
As our planetary climate disaster is a hyperobject at the very edge of our ability to understand, the cumulative consequences have triggered the collapse we are now facing or disastrously refusing to face.
It is evident, more so every day, that while we can refuse to accept the extent of our failure, we are well past the point of changing it.
The insanity that got us here is no longer straightforward, nor does it mean that everything fails and everyone dies. Most of what we have will fail, and many people will die. That has already begun.
The political, economic, and social systems we have worked to impose or passively accept are far from what is needed. Elements of what we have made in much smaller and very different systems will survive the dying.
Ironically, which is always a term that applies to major failures, we may have the knowledge, technology, ideas, and science to have made something that would have worked, but we didn't.
Many people will go to their graves committed to the same failed systems they cannot accept as failures. Our youth will sort it out, but the price we put on that project is brutal. But that is always the generational reality; it is just planetary now. That is new.
Can we manage our social evolution? We must.
Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 2, 2023
Originally published at rlandok.substack.com
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